MARCH 2010
Creating MyHomepage at DSTA
Categorised under: articles, case studies, intranets
In many organisations, the implementation of social and collaborative tools is supplementing and extending existing knowledge management (KM) initiatives. In this case study, the KM team from the Defence Science & Technology Agency (DSTA) in Singapore, describes the implementation of ‘MyHomepage’.
A new feature of the revamped staff directory, this is designed to enable better communication, dialogue and expertise sharing between employees.
A networked organisation
One of DSTA’s strategies is to sustain and increase its multi-disciplinary expertise in defence science and technology. This includes building up new capabilities and encouraging staff to take ownership of their learning and competency development.
One of DSTA’s strategies is to sustain and increase expertise
As part of an organisational transformation, an Organisation Capability Directorate (OCD) was set up in 2006. The OCD consists of eight competency communities (CCs), which are grouped by technical disciplines and competencies. Every staff member belongs to a CC, which is the ‘home base’ for competency development and career management.
Staff will be assigned to projects that are undertaken by operating units across DSTA, according to job and competency needs.
To enable staff to connect easily to the community they belong to, the KM team worked with the respective CC heads and CC knowledge managers to develop and nurture each CC as a vibrant community, where information and knowledge is shared and exchanged spontaneously and continuously through online and face-to-face interactions.
To build on the communities, a key strategic initiative was to revamp the DSTA staff directory and give users a profile-style page.
Enhancing PeopleFinder
Since 2002, DSTA has deployed a first-generation ‘PeopleFinder’ on the intranet for finding and connecting people. It systematically exposed useful data from the HR system (i.e. name, photo, department, phone number and email address) and at the same time allowed individuals to update selected fields such as supervisor(s), office number, location, and also upload a free-format HTML file for sharing their interests and personal hobbies. However, staff updating was not done consistently, resulting in poor data quality.
Over the years, DSTA’s corporate databases have become more mature, allowing them to extract more relevant information about staff. Increasingly, the organisation also needed a platform to build community learning and sharing, and to enhance the professional social network within DSTA.
Subsequently, in late 2006, DSTA embarked on revamping PeopleFinder and rebranding it as the ‘Staff Directory: MyHomepage’.
The enhanced staff directory consumes more structured data from the HR system, provides a structured format for staff resumes, and also systematically weaves in several web 2.0 concepts for learning and sharing. Overall, the new staff directory has been positioned to become the central location for connecting staff, knowledge-sharing and professional recognition.
The blog functionality of the DSTA ‘MyHomepage’
Two individual screens of the ‘MyResume’ feature, which is automatically created from HR data
Screenshot of the ‘MyTechReports’ page
Screenshot of the ‘MyGlossary’ page
Chief executive endorsement
DSTA’s chief executive (CE) launched the new staff directory in September 2007. In his launch speech he said: ‘Effectively, this is your new MyHomepage or personal blog, designed to better connect all of us as a community. This will help enhance our social networks as well as allow us to search for someone who can help us in any specific subject or problem.’
The CE also encouraged staff to treat this ‘as your very own homepage’ and noted that ‘management can also use this to better deploy and develop our people’.
Features of MyHomepage
MyHomepage serves as a one-stop-shop for staff to share and showcase their work experience professional achievements, ideas, thoughts and innovations.
MyContacts
This section shows the basic contact information for staff members. The data comes from an HR database. Data includes appointments, a photo, supervisor(s), contact information and location.
MyRoles
MyRoles provides an overview of various roles and services performed by the staff member. It include roles in committees, in professional capacities such as ‘subject matter expert’ and ‘techwatch leader’, and secondary appointments.
Essentially, the role information not only provides clarity for the multiple roles undertaken by each staff member, it’s become a reliable and valuable resource for quickly searching and connecting staff.
MyResume
This is a structured space for staff to share their personal resumes in the areas of career aspiration, work experience, professional achievements and contributions. There’s also a section to share the lighter side about themselves, add family information and photos and more. It’s template-based and therefore very structured and easy to update.
Department heads and management staff are also tapping into MyResume as added inputs to aid project planning, staff development and staff deployment. It’s proved an important avenue for staff to ‘market’ themselves.
Staff are encouraged to share their expertise and experience
MyBlog
Blogging in DSTA takes on a new meaning. On the internet, blogs are typically personal for individuals to share and comment. In DSTA, various ‘sharing corners’ based on domains of interest are established by techwatch groups and communities of practice at the various community portals on the intranet.
As staff share experience and lessons at these sharing corners, the blogs are then consolidated automatically at the individual’s MyHomepage, thus creating a personalised blog.
Staff can now blog at various sharing corners and contribute to various communities, and their posts are also aggregated on their MyHomepage. This has been nicknamed ‘reverse blogging’.
MyTechReports
DSTA staff are encouraged to share expertise and experience at professional conferences and journals and in-house learning events are conducted to impart knowledge to colleagues.
Now, any shared technical reports and materials can be submitted to the Knowledge Hub and linked with MyHomepage.
MyGlossary
Besides having an official DSTA glossary, in the course of their work staff may come across further useful glossary resources and links. They can now capture them according to various domains and subject areas, both for sharing and as useful references. As staff share, the glossary and links are also consolidated on their MyHomepage.
A high impact initiative
Upon joining DSTA, all new staff learn about KM in action at DSTA during an induction course, where they are introduced to MyHomepage and encouraged to participate in sharing resumes and learning at a the beginning of their career with DSTA.
Super data
The rich information in the staff directory has enabled employees to be better connected and recognised in the organisation.
By reading their MyHomepage, others can learn about past work experience, what the employee is blogging about, the papers they have published and so on.
Practically, with 3,000 staff in DSTA, it’s been a challenge to get to know who’s who. On average, the number of staff directory searches is now around 20,000. It can hit 30,000 during the month of staff appraisals.
Beside face-to-face engagements, DSTA management staff have found MyHomepage a great source to get to know their staff. With clarity in role and services, staff can quickly connect to the right people and it also greatly enhances the effectiveness and ease of job hand-overs.
Beyond individual pages, as the contents and data are stored centrally, DSTA is systematically organising and building up a central knowledge repository for mining and research. The information is retained even when a staff member leaves the organisation. Potentially, this is a useful source of information for connecting staff beyond organisational boundaries.
Promoting the value of sharing
MyHomepage has become a strategic platform to encourage staff to come together to form groups or CoPs for further learning and sharing, and building new competencies and capabilities. With incentives and encouragement by management, more and more staff are getting used to online sharing. To this end, the KM team actively promotes good examples of MyResume, ‘Bloggers of the month’, ‘Top-blogger of the year’, and more. These small activities go a long way towards raising awareness, confidence and familiarity with the features and functions of staff directory and MyHomepage.
Continuous improvement
We’ve learned that it’s not a one-time launch of MyHomepage, but a continuous process of leadership by example and staff engagement.
We’ve also learned the importance of collating and analysing usage statistics on the likes of contributions and search activities, so as to provide measured results to management and staff on the system’s progression and also encourage, to some extent, healthy competition across various communities and entities.
Management support
Management sponsorship has played an important part in the success of MyHomepage. Calls from managers to staff to embrace MyHomepage as an avenue to advertise themselves, and managers themselves putting up their own resumes, definitely led the way.
At the working level, the efforts put in by the DSTA KM and intranet teams to promote and lend a helping hand in migrating some existing content for the staff, have been equally important, enabling staff to quickly enjoy the benefits of MyHomepage.
Project credits
The MyHomepage project team also included: Peck Khey Syn, Malathi D/O Theyagarajan, N Selvi, Jessie Quek Pei Pei, Jenny Goo Ai Hong, Crysta Chang Hui Ling, Justin Chong Li-Min and Low Cheng Heng.
Tags: case studies, expertise, intranets, social tools, staff directories
